Trends from 2013: technology

I continue my look back at the year’s major trendlines in education and technology. This is the second post of a series based on the FTTE reports, starting with this one on 2013’s education trends.

Today’s post asks: which technology trends dominated 2013?

Obviously this is a vast and complex field, so I’ve identified tendencies which are having an impact in education already, or which plausibly might do so in 2014:

3d printing continues to innovate and grow. Every week sees new uses of 3d printing, as that technology develops as a consumer and industrial good.

New interfaces. The mouse and keyboard have been shouldered to one side by the rapid rise of new forms of computer interaction, including voice (think Siri and “OK Glass), touchscreen, and hands-free gestures (Xbox Kinect). While keyboard and mouse remains widely used, it is no longer the interface for a supermajority of use cases.

Social media. The social Web moved from strength to strength, taking up an ever-increasing amount of our time and digital behaviors. Twitter, Facebook, blogging continue to have enormous user bases, while Pinterest races up to join them, and Google+ steadily grows.

Automation’s promise. Many discussions of the global economy turned to issues of automating human activities by robotics, software, or both. Notably, IBM’s Watson took up new functions.

Cloud computing. This form of outsourcing data and computation is no longer seen as a wildly new thing. Instead, many users and a growing number of institutions simply use cloud services for a variety of functions.